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Three's a Company - Our Trio of HD 4830 Cards

PowerColor Radeon HD 4830 512MB GDDR3

Our first Radeon HD 4830 card is from PowerColor. It comes with PCS (Professional Cooling System) cooler, which is increasingly common on PowerColor cards these days, and sports ATI's reference clock speeds. The memory chips and voltage controllers are cooled by copper heatsinks, which are a nice touch.

The PowerColor HD 4830 has a trio of video outputs, DVI, VGA and HDMI. As it is probably a review sample rushed to us by PowerColor, the box it came with had nothing other than a quick installation guide and a CD containing the necessary drivers.

Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 512MB GDDR3

Also sporting reference clock speeds is the Sapphire Radeon HD 4830. It has a cooler that's very similar to the one found on the PowerColor, with the exception of the rather outlandish plastic styling that is on the cooler, of course. Unlike the PowerColor Radeon HD 4830, however, the eight memory chips from Qimonda on the Sapphire are left exposed.

This is what the Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 came with:

Quick installation guide

CD containing drivers

1 x DVI-to-VGA adapter

1 x DVI-to-HDMI adapter

1 x Molex-to-PCIe connector

1 x S/Video out

HIS Radeon HD 4830 512MB GDDR3

Our third and final card is one by the Hong Kong-based HIS. It too has reference clock speeds though quite unfortunately, this model does not come with HIS' acclaimed IceQ 4 cooler. Rather, it employs a cooler that looks similar to the ones found on the other two cards. Also, like the Sapphire Radeon HD 4830, the memory chips on the HIS Radeon HD 4830 are left exposed. The voltage controllers, however, are cooled by a copper heatsink that has lots of grooves and fins.

The following are what we found in the package of the HIS Radeon HD 4830: